A shiver-inducing tribute to the emptiness of the Jazz age
Posted By Daisy
‘I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool’. (Daisy Buchanan)
The film is a perfect tribute to the booze and party orgy of
the 1920’s prohibition era – all dancing girls with green eye-shadow, and champagne
sloshing in vintage coupes, and a thousand tinsel threads raining down upon the
party goers who dance a super energetic Charleston.
But behind the great American dream is dirt and poverty. The
Valley of Ashes is a no-man’s industrial wasteland between Manhattan and Long
Island, its people bored and black with soot, perpetually watched by Dr TJ
Eckleberg’s tarnished spectacles on a faded advertising hoarding. Myrtle is
exactly as I had pictured her, and the scene in her rented apartment is in
stark contrast to Gatsby’s polished parties; grubby feather pillows split open
and stick to sweaty bodies, couples have sex in an adjoining bedroom, and drugs
are passed from tongue to tongue and washed down with whisky. As he gazes down onto the street below, Nick
realises he neither belongs here nor in West Egg.
Luhrmann ensures that none of the women in the film are portrayed
as being classically beautiful – Myrtle (I didn’t even realise it was Isla
Fisher) is a pathetic, sleazy creature with an artificial painted rosebud
mouth, and Daisy (Carey Mulligan) is ten-a-penny pretty. The dancing women are
older and plumper than expected, and Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki) the young
golf professional is a sexless beanpole in her long dresses. I
like Daisy in the beginning. She’s bright and breezy, floating through life as
if behind a gauze curtain, her money shielding her from reality. Gatsby tries
to mirror this by smothering her with silk shirts in an odd display of
carelessness, but ultimately he tries too hard.
Luhrmann makes the heat another character in the room at the Plaza hotel, irritating everyone and niggling already-fraying
tempers. Cigars and cigarettes sizzle as they are lit and sweat trickles on the
back of necks as a busboy chips ice off a huge block to fill the cut-glass
whiskey tumblers. For the first time, Gatsby, in his creased pink pin-striped
suit, loses control and reveals his true self, if only for a moment, a lock of
Brilliantined hair tumbling onto his forehead as he rages at Tom and Daisy and
his inability to be a part of their world.
Luhrmann also portrays Nick’s otherness perfectly - he is always
behind curtains, listening at partially closed doors or watching from above,
always on his own unless someone needs a favour from him.
I watched the film with a continuous nausea, from the swooshing
camera pans to Gatsby’s roaring yellow motor car squashing water melon on the
road, and the crowds of party-goers swaying in their cars as they roar their
way up Gatsby’s lit-up driveway.
I’m going to see it again next week – this time in 3D. I can’t
wait.
Time for a re-read, I think.
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